[YamahaFG180]

The Catholic Bible contains books that the Protestant Bible doesn't contain. Why is this? I know I could find the answer for myself in a history book... but this is easier.

[Luke]

Because the Reformers didn't believe said books to be God-inspired. For that matter, the Catholics didn't even add them until slightly after Acquinas' time

[eldestofvic]

Originally posted by Luke
Because the Reformers didn't believe said books to be God-inspired. For that matter, the Catholics didn't even add them until slightly after Acquinas' time

Actually Luke, you'd be wrong on that one.

The original text of the Vulgate Bible was written in the late 300's (that was about 1000 years before the Angelic Doctor graced the scene) and it contained the Septuagint text even then (as that was the same OT text that would have been used by Christ himself).

Those texts were always a part of the Catholic Bible and still are today.

Though Catholics are willing to accept with charity that todays Protestants believe, in good faith, the modern (very modern) Protestant claim of a distinction between "original" text (i.e. Catholic Text) and "inspired" text (i.e. Protestant text) we still have to grin at the fact that all the "uninspired" parts of the Bible removed by the first Reformers were the parts that supported the distinctively Catholic doctrines. Things that make ya go hmmmm.

Yamaha - I've posted a brief description of our Bible in the "What do you believe" thread over in Apology/Evangalize. Hope it helps.

[Luke]

The Septuigant, unlike many Catholics will claim, did not necessarily contain the Apocryphal books. When the Bishop of Alexandria handed down the then-believed canon in his 375 Easter Letter, he included but one Apocryphal book (Baruch). This letter was looked to in later councils determining the canon. As I said before, the Apocrypha did not come into wide acceptance until after Acquinas' time.

[eldestofvic]

QUOTE]Originally posted by Luke
The Septuigant, unlike many Catholics will claim, did not necessarily contain the Apocryphal books. When the Bishop of Alexandria handed down the then-believed canon in his 375 Easter Letter, he included but one Apocryphal book (Baruch). This letter was looked to in later councils determining the canon. As I said before, the Apocrypha did not come into wide acceptance until after Acquinas' time. [/QUOTE]

Sorry Luke.

First of all St Athanasius published his Canon in 367 (he was dead by 375). Furthermore, St Athanasius' Canon does, in fact, contain all of the 27 books that we currently include in our NT. This is the Canon of which he made the famous decree "let no man add to them or take anything away from them." Now Athanasius was considered a great man of the early church, primarily because of his apologia against the Arians (for which he was exiled 5 times) and his promotion of Monasticism (he wrote the biography of St Anthony - sometimes spelled Antony - the first of the great monastic "wild men") and therefore his Canon was widely accepted. However, he was addressing the contents of the New Testament not the Old (which was already considered a given).

And furthermore...

Though he may have made the proclamations it wasn't official until 382 when it was accepted by Pope St. Damasus 1. Establishing official creeds and canons of the Church was already unquestionably Rome's responsibility.

annnnnd furthermore....

In fact an epistle attributed to St Athanasius was included in the Codex Alexandrius and this early Bible contained all of the current Septuagint deutero-canonical books (and then some!). This Canon was based on the work of Origen from the mid 200's

Next, it was precisely the difficulties that Athanasius and other apologists were having with the errors creeping into the biblical texts that caused Pope St. Damasus to ask St. Jerome (16 years later) to retire to Bethlehem and standardize the Latin text. Jerome completed this work 35 years later (meanwhile he also helped the Jews rewrite their OT and also he took up the battle against the Arians and the Pelagians). He did it first by converting the text from it's Hellenized Greek form back to Hebrew and then into Latin. And in so doing he relied on the known Jewish texts and the work of St. Origen who predated Athanasius by about 100 years. It was both Athanasius' work and Jeromes work that Pope Boniface used in 419 to establish the official Bible of the Church.

Then there are historical records. The Codex Vaticanus dating it to the fourth century which contains all of the Septuagint texts. There is the Codex Alexandrius (of which there is a copy in the British Museum). It dates to the fifth century and contains all of the books in the Codex Vaticanus and some further books of Maccabees plus two letters of Clement (he would have been Bishop of Rome two after Peter as well as the aforementioned Epistle attributed to Athanasius). Last but not least there is the Codex Siniaticus which was very recently discovered (if you call 1853 recent) which is an incomplete set (but still containing books from the Duetero-canonical texts as well as texts that have since been discarded like the Letters of Clement, the Gospel of Nicodemus etc.). This dates again to fourth century and shows that these books were very much in use in the Jewish homeland.

Finally we have the words of Pope Leo in the 5th century, "in the area of moral precepts no decrees of the earlier testament are rejected rather in the gospel teaching many of them are augmented so that the things that give salvation might be more perfect and more lucid than those that promise the saviour". Sounds to me like they were sticking with what they knew.

The problem, of course, is that the early church was a missionary church. They were taking the gospel first to the hinterlands of the Roman Empire and then as they made their peace with the later invaders they went to work converting them. Very often the first thing the missionaries had to do was to create entirely a written language for the converts as St Cyril had to do for those tribes that would someday become Russia (cyrillic). The earliest know German text dates to 381 when Ulfilas translated it into Gothic which was German back then (that's right the first bible given to the Germans in their native language didn't come from Luther). However, this naturally led back to some of the earlier problems resulting mostly from the vaguaries of translations. This of course would have continued to be offset by the practice of Sacred Tradition until however the Reformation came along. Therefore, at the Council of Trent the Church reestablished doctrinally exactly what the Bible was and what it wasn't (and that was two hundred years after Aquinas which could hardly be considered in his time). Part of this was to establish definitively that the official bible of the church was the original Latin text. However, the basic content hadn't changed since it was written 1200 years earlier.

[Bryan]

well the Apocrypha wasn't officially canonized until the time of Martin Luther.

[eldestofvic]

Originally posted by Bryan
well the Apocrypha wasn't officially canonized until the time of Martin Luther.

?????

Allow me to repeat myself. Pope Boniface ratified the text of the Catholic bible in 419AD. These texts already existed at that time. It was only restated at the Council of Trent (i.e. Luther's time) about 1100 years later. And Bryan the discussion is not about their canonization (which I repeat happened in 419) but their existence.

Furthermore by, the time of the Council of Trent all the current beliefs of the Catholic Church were firmly entrenched (Purgatory, Indulgences, the Sacraments etc.) What exactly were they to base these practices on if the texts were not there to support it?